Sunday, April 03, 2011

After a harrowing incident late Friday afternoon when a five-foot-long hole ripped through the fuselage of a Southwest Airlines 737-300 airliner at 36,000 feet over Arizona, disruptions and delays continue on Southwest today. In fact, Southwest is cancelling more flights today than it did yesterday.

Yesterday, Southwest grounded 79 of its 737s to check for fuselage cracks. Southwest cancelled 252 of its 2,901 departures yesterday and had long delays throughout its network.

Today, as of 2 p.m. EDT, Southwest has already canceled 279 of its 3,089 scheduled departures, about a third of which had departed by 2 p.m., according to Flightstats.com

Bio

Joe Sharkey's work appears in major national and international publications. For 19 years until 2015 he was a weekly columnist for the New York Times. He is now a weekly travel and entertainment columnist with the global website Travel.Buzz, as well as an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Arizona, He has written five books, four non-fiction and a novel, one of which is in development as a movie. Previously, he was an assistant national editor at the Wall Street Journal and a reporter and columnist with the Philadelphia Inquirer.
On Sept. 29, 2006, he was one of seven people on a business jet who survived a mid-air collision with a 737 over the Amazon. All 154 on the 737 died. His report on the crash appeared on the front page of the New York Times and later in the Sunday Times of London magazine.
He and his wife Nancy (who is a professor of journalism at the University of Arizona) live in Tucson with horses and parrots. He is working on a new novel about an international travel writer who hates to travel.
"JoeSharkey.com" is Copyright (c) 2006-2015 by Joe Sharkey.